StorX VS marmot

Apparently it is still common practice to have such "if bla is set, when do blub" everywhere in ones code? No functions with decorators or a similar or alternative concept? I would think there should be some kind of easy to use mechanism in place, that tends to avoid forgetting these ifs.

There are ... 60 lines of global logic, that is not encapsulated in any function or so?

Some of the functions are quite long. But I think mostly because they render out HTML.

At line 107 with the procedure printHeader starting, what I call PHP nightmare starts:

Switching back and forth between PHP, HTML and HTML with integrated JS (!!!) and CSS. All of course without syntax highlighting, but that is a minor issue. The major issue is treating HTML and JS and CSS as mere strings, instead of structured data, and the very bad readability of having procedures suddenly "end" and spit out some wild HTML, then suddenly continuing again, because some server side logic/decision is required at some place in that stream of unstructured data, whether some part is to be included or not, then the stream continues and then at some point one needs to actually check, that one did not forget to truly end the procedure. This has some of the worst readability. Maybe C code with bit magic is worse.

One can find this kind of approach in many, if not most, Wordpress plugins. What's more is, that this is also terrible for writing tests. The procedures do not return a value to check against. All is a side effect. Perhaps there is some PHP library that manipulates the PHP system, so that one can at least do string comparisons on the side effects. Like mocking, basically. But still terrible for testing.

For a comparison of how it should be done instead, check any templating engine, that at least separates template files from PHP code. Better, checkout SXML libraries, that treat HTML as structured data, a tree that can be traversed and pattern matched against, without pulling out arcane string manipulations or regular expressions. And then consider how one could write tests based on such structured data.

If this "HTML is a string, even on the server side before sending it" kind of approach is how a language treats HTML, then the language is not suitable to be directly used for HTML templating, without any additional library. This alone has caused uncountable security issues in so many projects.

I realize, that this is probably kind of a "one off script" and may not reflect other kinds of PHP code.

I did all of those things myself, years ago. And when I already had moved away from such an approach, I had to maintain a project, that was written this way. It had no tests of course. No fun. It has not that much to do with you personally being a good dev or not. I think it has to do with the ecosystem encouraging you to do these things. Outputting HTML like that should be declared illegal and should be impossible.

https://github.com/aaviator42/StorX/blob/main/StorX.php in comparison looks much better. It seems it does not output things directly. Everything seems wrapped nicely into methods. One obvious footgun seems to be another global state thing, that I really hope is not a thing in PHP itself:

    const THROW_EXCEPTIONS = TRUE;

I'm a huge fan of SQLite! My org's apps use it heavily, often via this simple key-value interface built on sqlite: https://github.com/aaviator42/StorX

Handles tens of thousands of requests a day very smoothly! :)

My org's apps heavily use this simple key-value interface built on sqlite: https://github.com/aaviator42/StorX

There's also a bunch of other purpose-built tiny utilities on that GitHub account.

I wrote a small PHP library that gives you a key-value storage interface to SQlite files: https://github.com/aaviator42/StorX

I've been dogfooding for a while by using it in my side projects.

And there's a basic API too, to use it over a network: https://github.com/aaviator42/StorX-API

This is probably ready to be used in production by others, but I wrote a library that gives you a key-value storage interface to SQlite files: https://github.com/aaviator42/StorX

And there's an API too, to use it over a network: https://github.com/aaviator42/StorX-API

If you're willing to accept eventual consistency (a big ask, but acceptable in some scenarios) then there are options like marmot [1] that replicate cdc over nats.

[1]: https://github.com/maxpert/marmot

I've written a whole SQLite replication system that works on top of RAFT ( https://github.com/maxpert/marmot ). Best part is RAFT has a well understood and strong library ecosystem as well. I started of with libraries and when I noticed I am reimplementing distributed streams, I just took off the shelf implementation (https://docs.nats.io/nats-concepts/jetstream) and embedded it in system. I love the simplicity and reasoning that comes with RAFT. However I am playing with epaxos these days (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/papers/epaxos-sosp2013.pdf), because then I can truly decentralize the implementation for truly masterless implementation. Right now I've added sharding mechanism on various streams so that in high load cases masters can be distributed across nodes too.

Very interesting! I have question ( out of my experience in https://github.com/maxpert/marmot ) how do get around the boot time, specially when a change log of table is pretty large in Postgres? I've implemented snapshotting mechanism in Marmot as part of quickly getting up to speed. At some level I wonder if we can just feed this PG replication log into NATS cluster and Marmot can just replicate it across the board.

One of the reasons I started writing Marmot (https://maxpert.github.io/marmot/) was for replicating bunch of tables across regions that were read heavy. I even used it for cache replication (because who cares if it’s a cache miss, but a hit will save me time and money). It’s hard to make such blue prints in early days of product, and by the time you hit a true growth almost everyone builds a custom solution for multi-region IAM.

Amazing I was just looking for a good mail server to configure for my demo. Which reminds me since you folks have mentioned LiteStream, have you tried Marmot (https://github.com/maxpert/marmot); I recently configured Isso with Marmot to scale it out horizontally (https://maxpert.github.io/marmot/demo). I am super curious what kind of write workload on a sub thousand people organization will have and if Marmot can help scale it horizontally without Foundation DB. I always find the the convenience of SQLite amazing.

Great that you brought it up. I will fill in the perspective of what I am doing for solving this in Marmot (https://github.com/maxpert/marmot). Today Marmot already records changes via installing triggers to record changes of a table, hence all the offline changes (while Marmot is not running) are never lost. Today when Marmot comes up after a long offline (depending upon max_log_size configuration), it realizes that and tries to catch up changes via restoring a snapshot and then applying rest of logs from NATS (JetStream) change logs. I am working on change that will be publishing those change logs to NATS before it restores snapshots, and once it reapplies those changes after restoring snapshot everyone will have your changes + your DB will be up to date. Now in this case one of the things that bothers people is the fact that if two nodes coming up with conflicting rows the last writer wins.

For that I am also exploring on SQLite-Y-CRDT (https://github.com/maxpert/sqlite-y-crdt) which can help me treat each row as document, and then try to merge them. I personally think CRDT gets harder to reason sometimes, and might not be explainable to an entry level developers. Usually when something is hard to reason and explain, I prefer sticking to simplicity. People IMO will be much more comfortable knowing they can't use auto incrementing IDs for particular tables (because two independent nodes can increment counter to same values) vs here is a magical way to merge that will mess up your data.